Use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ - normal chronological feed and no trending anything. Then prune your following. I don't see any witch hunts; my feed is generally very positive.

I have tweets come up in chronological rather than selected order, and it's still crap on a regular bases because people are crap. There's not much you can do besides unfollowing people who are consistently annoying or vapid.

I think retweets/quote tweets are a bigger problem. I can understand why a large number of people I follow might tweet about the same thing, but I don't need to see that thing reproduced 10 times.